So tomorrow is our moving day, and it looks like our internet won’t be hooked up in the new place until Jan. 5th. I’ve been attempting to recruit people to help with the move – fortunately my brother has just moved to the lower mainland from Ottawa, and he and his girlfriend offered to help using my mother’s minivan.

I rather wanted to hire movers with a truck, since we don’t really have that much stuff and we didn’t want to have to deal with the physical labour of moving ourselves for once. Sadly, the budget did not allow for such things, and so I’m recruiting friends and family. Great fun. I don’t think I’d know where to start looking for movers, either way – never actually used one before. At least we can offer the standard pizza. I’d offer beer, but so far no one helping us actually likes beer except my brother.

I really, really hope that this time we stay in the place for a long time. I don’t expect to ever be able to purchase a home in the Vancouver area, but it would be good to be renting a place that’s nice enough to settle into.

There’s been mention on this site before about the Vancouver based blog conference Northern Voice [nv] that’s being held in February. I have been considering registering, and with the schedual finally out my interest is futher peaked.

First I’m going to make sure I survive New Year’s, then I’ll think about registering.

After a grueling set of exams, I have been helping my parents move from Coquitlam to Maple Ridge. My parents were able to find a two year old home just slightly smaller than their old one for about $360K. Yikes! I remember when it was easy to buy a three bedroom house in Coquitlam for under $150,000. At this rate I will never be able to buy a house in the Lower Mainland. Now that the average price for a single detached house in Abbotsford is around $250,000 it looks like my wife and I will be renting for many years to come.

It was interesting looking through their old things. My parents have been living in the tri-cities for almost 25 years now. While we were packing, we found a whole slew of CP Rail paraphernalia

Jenny Lee was talking before about her lack of plans for New Year’s Eve [mb] previously and I thought that my own fate was going to be very similiar (sitting in my apartment watching Joss Whedon’s Serenity). However after a little bit of arm pulling I was convinced to once again risk the disaster that New Year’s has always represented for me and venture out into the wider world beyond my apartment building and delivery sushi.

I’ll be attending the New Year’s Eve party at the Railyway Club. I spent an hour waking from one end of Seymour to the other searching for it today so I could buy my ticket, but now I’ve got it and I’m ready to count down from ten to one and then pretend to have passed a milestone.

Our gang here at Metroblogging Vancouver has grown by three new authors this week. I’d like to be the first, if not the finest, to welcome Alanah Downie, Rachael Ashe and Ryan Cousineau to the site. This brings our total number of authors up to thirteen, though we’re always looking for more to join.

I don’t know any of the new writers, but that’s not odd since I’ve never met any of the (not so) old authors either. Having said that I look forward to seeing their posts, and reading their own private blogs. The only one of which I’d read before was Alanah’s Vancouver Canucks Op Ed.

*****

The other news is that I just learned that Bombay India officially changed it’s name in 1995 to Mumbia [mb]. The reason I discovered this is that today Mumbia became the first Indian city to join the Metroblogging family. Want to know learn something else new? Well citizens of Mumbia are called Mumbaikars.

Matthew Good’s been doing a year in review over at his blog that is fairly unique since instead of being what I, and I think anyone who checks out his site semi-regularly, expected it’s a personal recap of the year and not a look back at the major political events. It’s also really compelling reading, especially his lattest entry [mblog] where he talks about his history within the record industry, or at least skims over it with some detail.

What is surprising is how honest he is with it, though I don’t suppose I should be that shocked. I’ve interviewed him twice once for the Phoenix my university student paper, and this last time for The Kelowna Daily Courier‘s arts suplement. This last time he was touring and promoting In A Coma, which if it wasn’t a best-of collection would have been my favorite album of the year, and was actually fairly open to talking about the past.

This is a link to a recoding of the interview that I’ve got on my site [jeff simpson], and then if you click the read more button on this post I’m going to paste some of the article here. I only could find the rough draft, so let’s all pretend I made it prettier okay. And definitly check out Good’s post if you’re not already a reader of the MBlog.(more…)

Posted in Vancouver Blogs | Comments Off on Tell them I’m coming and hell’s coming with me

With the Canucks finally winning a game, and the World Junior Championships in full swing in British Columbia it’s a good time for hockey in our city.

Being held in Vancouver, Kelowna and Kamloops the World Junior Championships bring together some of the world’s next superstars, and the players who’ll be featuring in the NHL in a few short years.

Canada’s the defending champions, and hopefully they can hold onto their title thanks to their home court advantage. The games so far have ranged from very good, to somewhat boring like the Norway versus Switzerland game I saw a few days ago.

Currently Canada is tied for the top spot in our group with the United States, which hopefully means that we’ll be getting into the knock out part of the tournament.

Just when we were all feeling happy, lazy and like the the world was nearly perfect because of the holiday goggles we’ve all been wearing to distort our vision the Federal election careens into view like a drunk driver with their high beams on.

The most recent news getting actions of our politicans on parade is a name calling match between the NDP and the Liberals. Liberal Cabinet member David Emerson made a comment, which was then refered to on a Liberal blog, saying that NDP leader Jack Layton has a “boiled dog’s head smile”. Talking about a Layton speech the blog noted:

Jack Layton had a great weekend in BC. First he managed to find something nice to say about Svend Robinson, although the performance struck me as a touch insincere, even for Jack Layton. How did Minister Emerson describe his style at our Convention dinner? Oh yes, he said that Jack Layton had a boiled dog’s head smile. That would have made even me wince if I hadn’t have been laughing so hard. Then Toronto Jack really caused a stir by declaring that he wasn’t really all that opposed to private health clinics. Ummm, so why are we having an election then?

Now that’s a fairly random insult, unless you’re using your Secret Agent Decoder Ring which will translate “boiled dog’s head smile” into something insulting in Chinese. Now why are we having an election where a WASPy MP is insulting another WASPy MP with clunky Chinese insults?

Well Emerson blames his wife from whom he got the phrase.

“She’s got tons of them,” he said of his wife’s colourful phrases. “We certainly use it in our family and my wife says it’s commonly used in the Cantonese community. It certainly wasn’t meant as disrespectful.”

New Year’s Eve is fast approaching, but I find myself at a loss for what to do. Since we found an apartment and are moving on the 1st anyway, the husband and I don’t plan to do much in the way of partying, but I find that even if we wanted something to do, I wouldn’t know where to go. Last year we went to a party where we barely knew anyone, having only moved here a couple of months before.

If anything, I might have gone to the First Night Celebrations, but I have discovered that they aren’t being held. I used to go to Toronto’s First Night when I could stand the cold – I was hoping it would be something like that – an outdoor celebration with live music and other such nonsense.

I think we’ll probably just stay home in our packed-up apartment and celebrate together. New Year’s Eve will not be the night I learn to be more social and attempt to make local friends. Perhaps later in the year. Maybe that should be my resolution.

so this was my ninth christmas in vancouver.
well, mostly in vancouver, since my folks moved to chilliwack at roughly the same time i moved to vancouver i’ve spent christmas day mostly there.
i think this was the first christmas that i never saw even one snowflake. our atmosphere just seemed to know that there needed to be some that feel either xmas eve, xmas day or boxing day. just seemed to know. cause they always seemed to fall.
i’d always wondered if my holidays would seem lacking without the falling of the white stuff. i had determined that my holidays were just fine without a collection of the stuff on the ground, because just falling doesn’t mean collection around here. but i had not yet determined if the complete lack would make a difference.

so now it’s the 28th.
this is the first i’ve noticed.
guess it’s not important to me at all.

i guess those 40 below xmases with a few feet of snow on the ground solved such needs for me.